George Bernard Shaw

• 1. A Dublin Boy And A Musical House

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  George Bernard Shaw was born on the 26th of July 1856 at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw. The family belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, yet they lived in shabby-genteel poverty. His father was an ineffectual alcoholic who worked irregularly as a corn merchant after being pensioned off from civil service. His mother became close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father. The young Shaw found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing, and Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players. In 1862 Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin. They also kept a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressful. He was happier at the cottage where Lee's students gave him books. Thus he gained a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works while becoming familiar with a wide spectrum of literature. Between 1865 and 1871 Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated. He later wrote that schools were prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing their parents. In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents. He worked hard and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as George Shaw; after 1876, he dropped the George and styled himself Bernard Shaw.

• 2. The Fabian Path To Socialism

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  On the 5th of September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George. He then read George's book Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx. Thereafter he spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder, H. M. Hyndman, whom he found autocratic and ill-tempered. After reading a tract called Why Are The Many Poor? issued by the recently formed Fabian Society, Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting on the 16th of May 1884. He became a member in September, and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885. Later that year he recruited Webb and also Annie Besant, a fine orator. From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association. This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism. When in 1886, 87 the Fabians debated whether to embrace anarchism, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach. After a rally in Trafalgar Square addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities on the 13th of November 1887, Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power. Thereafter he largely accepted the principle of permeation as advocated by Webb. The notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties remained central to his thought. In 1889 the Fabian Society raised its profile with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second essay, Transition, details the case for gradualism and permeation. It asserts that the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone. In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is, a revision of an earlier tract. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions.

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• 3. From Novelist To Theatre Critic

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  The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally. He lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic. He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: Cashel Byron's Profession written in 1882, 83, and An Unsocial Socialist, begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in To-Day magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. Cashel Byron appeared in magazine and book form in 1886. In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of William Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of The World in 1886, he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were William Morris and John Ruskin. They emphasized morality, which appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of art for art's sake. Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known. After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto. In May 1890 he moved back to The World, where he wrote a weekly column as G.B.S. for more than four years. He ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950. From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris. As at The World, he used the by-line G.B.S. He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters.

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• 4. The Nobel Prize And Saint Joan

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  Shaw's first play to bring him financial success was Arms and the Man in 1894, a mock-Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. It ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. It earned him £341 in royalties in its first year, a sufficient sum to enable him to give up his salaried post as a music critic. Among the cast of the London production was Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894. The success of Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated. Candida received a single performance in South Shields in 1895. In 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny had a single staging at Croydon. In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage. His biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays. The first, John Bull's Other Island, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII. Man and Superman, completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in Robert Loraine's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara in 1905, The Doctor's Dilemma in 1906, and Caesar and Cleopatra, seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year. Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as discussion drama and serious farce. These plays included Getting Married premiered in 1908, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet in 1909, Misalliance in 1910, and Fanny's First Play in 1911. Androcles and the Lion ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913. It was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays, Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year. The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell. In 1923 he wrote Saint Joan, which was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March. Even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan. The citation for the literature prize for 1925 praised his work as marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty. He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it.

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• 5. Admirer Of Dictators And Eugenics

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  During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods. In 1922 he had welcomed Mussolini's accession to power in Italy, observing that amid the indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock, Mussolini was the right kind of tyrant. Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses. Beatrice Webb thought he was obsessed about Mussolini. Shaw's enthusiasm for the Soviet Union dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed Lenin as the one really interesting statesman in Europe. Having turned down several chances to visit, in 1931 he joined a party led by Nancy Astor. The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom Shaw later described as a Georgian gentleman with no malice in him. At a dinner given in his honour, Shaw told the gathering: I have seen all the terrors and I was terribly pleased by them. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described Hitler as a very remarkable man, a very able man. He professed himself proud to be the only writer in England who was scrupulously polite and just to Hitler. His principal admiration was for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade. Shaw saw the 1939 Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact as a triumph for Stalin who, he said, now had Hitler under his thumb. Shaw's increasing flirtation with dictatorial methods is evident in many of his subsequent pronouncements. A New York Times report dated the 10th of December 1933 quoted a recent Fabian Society lecture in which Shaw had praised Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. They are trying to get something done, and are adopting methods by which it is possible to get something done. Creative evolution, Shaw's version of the new science of eugenics, became an increasing theme in his political writing after 1900. By 1933, in the preface to On the Rocks, he was writing that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it. In an article in the American magazine Liberty in September 1938, Shaw included the statement: There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated.

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• 6. The Oscar And The Rejection Of Honours

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  Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of Pygmalion and Saint Joan. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal. He produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to keep it from winning one Academy Award. He described his award for best-written screenplay as an insult, coming from such a source. He became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. In a 1993 study of the Oscars, Anthony Holden observes that Pygmalion was soon spoken of as having lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, Major Barbara in 1941, was less successful both artistically and commercially than Pygmalion. It cost three times its original budget and was rated the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema. The film was poorly received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. Shaw thought its lavishness nullified the drama, and he considered the film a poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille. In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras, London. In the same year the British government asked Shaw informally whether he would accept the Order of Merit. He declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history. Throughout his life he refused all state honours.

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• 7. Writing Until The Final Days

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  Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were Buoyant Billions in 1947, his final full-length work; Farfetched Fables in 1948 a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution; a comic play for puppets, Shakes versus Shav in 1949, a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults; and Why She Would Not in 1950, which Shaw described as a little comedy, written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday. During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of 94 of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on the 6th of November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in September. Shaw's final political treatise, Everybody's Political What's What, was published in 1944. The book sold well, reaching 85,000 copies by the end of the year. Shaw wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman in 1902, Pygmalion in 1913 and Saint Joan in 1923. With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation. Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare.